As a massive stairway ends into the curvy corridor marking the beginning of a new exhibition at the National Museum, the first object is a grisly sight. Sculpted into a metre-high black volcanic rock, it shows a woman soldier cut in the middle with the intestines spilling out from both ends of the severed body. The injured fighter is from the times of the Kakatiya rulers of present-day Andhra Pradesh, at least six centuries before ?Jhansi ki Rani?. ?It is rare to find women warriors commemorated in those times,? remarks Naman P Ahuja, curator of The Body in Indian Art, an exhibition that has the 13th-century basalt sculpture of the woman soldier loaned from the Andhra Pradesh Archaeology Museum in Hyderabad along with 299 other works of art from 40 collectors across the country.
The woman warrior joins child-eating ogresses from the 2nd and 4th centuries sculpted in red sandstone and limestone from Guntur in Andhra Pradesh and Mathura in Uttar Pradesh. The two images of ?Hariti? tell the tale of how the ogresses became goddesses who protected children in the Buddhist iconography. The images of the women present a curious representation of the body as perceived by different communities and religions spanning three millennia of Indian culture. ?The body is the bedrock of the studies of art and civilisation,? explains Ahuja, an associate professor of ancient Indian art and architecture at the School of Art and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.
While the three 10th-century sandstone apsara sculptures from Khajuraho (borrowed from Indian Museum, Kolkata) celebrate the erotic power of the body, with nail marks left by the lover on the back of one of them, the imperfection is portrayed in the mid-20th century wooden carving of the demoness Putana, who is trying to kill the infant Krishna by smearing her breasts with poison. The exhibition also argues the case of Krishna?s parents giving him up for adoption to fulfill his destiny, while an 18th-century Mughal painting, titled The Nativity of Mary, raises the subject of immaculate conception, this time as shown in the Quran. The mothers from the ages seem to steal the show through a 2nd- or 3rd-century terracotta work of Saptmatrika (The Seven Mothers) from Patna Museum and an 18th-century wooden sculpture of a squatting woman giving birth to a baby. Contemporary Indian art has also found a place in the exhibition, which weaves the subjects of birth, death and rapture into the making of a civilisation. Subodh Gupta, one of the lenders to the exhibition, displays his 2010 stainless steel sculpture, Egg, while Sheela Gowda brings back to the exhibition her 1997 work, Draupadi?s Vow, a nearly two-metre-long work of threads and metal hooks depicting the creation and destruction of heroes.
First mounted at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Belgium, as part of the Europalia International Arts Festival where India was the guest country in the latest edition in 2013, The Body in Indian Art exhibition was later adapted for its India show, as the organisers say, ?adding several more exhibits from different parts of the country?. Nearly a quarter of the objects have never been shown before. ?This exhibition is a watershed,? says National Museum director general Venu V. ?It is more than double the size of the biggest exhibition we have ever had,? he says, adding that the exhibition, mounted by the museum from start to finish, will define the way the institution will organise exhibitions in the future. ?We are ready to raise the bar.?
The exhibition is on at National Museum, New Delhi, till June 7
Faizal Khan
Faizal Khan is a freelancer